


Home

by colorfulcharades



Category: La casa de papel | Money Heist (TV)
Genre: Andrés is hurt and Martín is despairing-freeform, Angst, Anxiety, Berlermo, Blood, Delirious Rambling, Emotional Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, I'm Sorry, M/M, Major Character Injury, Romantic Tension, but am i really, emotional terrorism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:27:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27464161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/colorfulcharades/pseuds/colorfulcharades
Summary: Their bodies were vessels for a life of art and tragedies.
Relationships: Berlin | Andrés de Fonollosa/Palermo | Martín Berrote
Comments: 10
Kudos: 30





	Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Isabelu_u](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isabelu_u/gifts), [ele_amato](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ele_amato/gifts).



> Warning: blood, injuries, angst, Martín suffering emotionally and Andrés' being deliriously romantic

The clock, it seems, had stopped long ago. 

Only the rain knocking softly against the window signals that the hours are passing. Though both of them are there, the house is achingly, uncommonly empty.

It’s the absence of music, maybe, ever a constant occurrence in their shared apartment, lack of any noise, of full laugh and the voices singing, talking until late at night. There are two lonely lights, one in the hallway and one in the abandoned living room, their traces silently pouring through the halls, not even daring to reach the bedroom’s open door. 

The night strolls through heavy November air undisturbed by noise, and the quiet makes him want to rip his hair out of his scalp. 

It’s like a graveyard, he thinks, and the thought makes him feel like puking. 

Hours have passed since he last moved from the old wooden chair beside the bed, and he didn’t bother getting up even when the pain started creeping up his back and alerting his nerves on the uncomfortable position. He stayed with his head hidden low, deep into the surface of his palms, freezing fingertips digging into his forehead and eyes closed to allow numbing darkness to sink in, but he still couldn’t stop shivering. The last of his strength and composure has left him long ago, it seems, and if it wasn’t for his exhausted body aching, Martín likely wouldn’t have noticed the passing of time. He is too empty to cry, unable to stand another look at the bed, at a pallid apparition that wore Andrés' face, unresponsive under the sheets ruined with blood. 

The darkness against his eyelids could never be enough to hide into.

Together, they have lived through thousands of mistakes, putting lives on the line for equations gone wrong, plans just a fraction more imperfect than they’d make them out to be, nights spent escaping, hiding, despairing. And Martín, he could stay alive, he could survive, with Andrés, through anything, but to forget he couldn’t. Not a single time. 

Forgetting was never a good friend of his.

And like all the other nights like this, the image is right there, embedded safely in the deepest of his thoughts, another nail in the coffin that was much too full of them already. It is him opening their door after hours of troubled waiting and unexplained dread seeping through his bones, it is his own eyes seeing Andrés in the darkness of the hallway, strange smile on his face with a lip split open, a glint in his eyes that was flickering dull like a dying candle. The black coat that he wore proudly had never looked so big on his shoulders. 

He was pale like a stone, like a statue made of marble, all angles and shadows and the darkness from the outside swallowing him whole. There was a fondness in his gaze when it settled back on him and, for a moment, Martín would have thought that the calm in his expression belonged to a painting. 

His lips were trembling when the smile stretched wider. 

_"I'm home… Martín…"_

Then Andrés had fallen like his strings were cut, and Martín wasn't prepared. He could never be. 

He recalls barely catching him in time, protecting him from the hard, cold floor through Andrés' last stumbling step, and with the first hitched breath against his ear, the world started slowly crumbling away. 

A shiver broke Andrés' body, almost palpable against his hands, and the sinking feeling in his chest returned like an omen. 

_(Andrés?)_

He remembers calling his name with a voice that didn't even sound like his own. 

Despair had pushed him to gasp in shock and look down, to find Andrés looking back at him with eyes barely open. He was there, still there, and his gaze was trembling, struggling to stay awake and concentrate on Martín's eyes when the entire world had started spinning. 

His hand coming to rest against Andrés' cheek had felt like such a natural thing to do, when it shouldn't have been, when Martín knows he should have been horrified of doing something so intimate. 

But his thoughts were sealed shut. He couldn't bring himself to. 

Andrés' skin was freezing cold. 

_"Martín…-"_

He was still smiling, but his eyes had looked like he was about to cry. 

Martín had let his fingers linger and caress for just a second longer, feeling a knife sharpened with guilt twisting in his chest, and then he was pulling them both away from the hallway and into their room, nearly completely carrying Andrés' weight on his shoulder. 

He had not weighed anything at all. 

Martín had felt the blood on Andrés' side and it stained, it stained his clothes, his hands, it stained that small place behind Martín's vision where he was always used to seeing Andrés smile. 

Where Andrés’ blood had touched him, parts of Martín's soul had slowly rotten away. 

And he could see it on Andrés too, he did, drenching his shaking hands and tailored clothes, blooming through the once pristine shirt and dripping to the floor, and Martín could never forget the way his body, ever stable, proud, had closed into himself as if he was already a dead man.

It was everywhere.

**_(Everywhere)._ **

He remembers those same dreaded, numbing hands taking a hold of Andrés’ shoulders when he fell limp against him, dragging him to bed because his legs could not support him anymore, how the voice he could barely hear had started whispering something, something weird and unintelligible, then mentioning people and an alley and _I’m sorry, Martín, it seemed so easy_ and _I love your eyes, today I thought of you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-_

Had it been any other day, the words would have melted him as if he touched the sun itself, and he wouldn't be able to stop a surge of colorful shivers spreading all throughout his limbs, nor the welcoming smile setting itself free on his lips. He would notice, he thinks, _Andrés would notice like he always does,_ and though he would never admit it to himself nor anyone else, something tells Martín that the sun would have smiled right back. He would walk inside as gracefully as he left, would pour wine in two crystal glasses and give one to Martín, and they would talk, they would laugh and drink and sing until their voices died down and their eyelids grew heavy on their vision. They would stumble happily to the bedroom they shared for months now, lazily changing to comfortable clothes and hiding under the bedsheets where they slept beside each other. 

Andrés would whisper, and Martín would listen until sleep carefully takes him away, back into the embrace of a dream where he would see that same sun smiling back at him once more. 

But there was no sun for him today. The rain was falling heavy all over him. 

It's been nothing but silence for a while now, but he can still feel the whispers, bits and pieces of Andrés' voice burning through his ears, his limbs, leaving frostbites in their wake. 

_Martín… are you angry at me?_

He was only half-aware of the fact that he had laid him to bed, taken off his clothes, desperately trying to mend torn flesh and bruised skin. 

_I'm sorry… were you sleeping?_

And every tremble, every breath, every fucking second had been death laughing at his face, the void he had always refused to acknowledge now chipping at his soul with each shaky puncture of a needle at his fingertips. Bite by bite, cut by cut it was tearing off the parts, until there was not thread enough in this world to keep it all together. 

By the time he finished it, Andrés had fallen unconscious, and Martín was left as lifeless as a ragdoll. 

He had looked at him, at first. Noticed every movement of a ribcage bound with bandages, blood clotting on the torn lower lip and darkness under his eyes. He had seen him weak before. They were too vulnerable for the dreams they had, too enchanted by risks to avoid all the accidents. Countless hours they have spent putting the other back together like broken porcelain, but all the experience has never made it any easier to see. It was always meant to be like this, most delightful highs and the lowest of the low, blood shining like diamonds and empty, crooked smiles, despair knocking on the door when they would feel like deities. It would hit them at their weakest, make them stumble down, drown in the chaos of their own mortality only to wake up again, get up again and do it all the same, dance with the doom lingering above their heads because it was all they ever knew how to do. And he knew, they knew, that one day it will end like this, too. 

Their bodies were vessels for a life of art and tragedies.

Any other time, the thought would have incited a depraved laugh. 

Now he just wishes for it all to go away, for the sleep to find his body and for the sun to not be dead by the morning, wishes to bang his head against the wall until it bleeds. 

He doesn't. 

Again, he seeks to bury his face into his hands, but he can’t stand their touch for a second anymore. He is suddenly too aware of the blood on their crevices, under his nails, on the back of his wrists where he held him tightly, and the warmth of it, the burn of it. It belonged to _him_ , and Martín could never wash it away. 

So he tries looking at the floor instead, and there it is. Andrés' black coat left crumpled and in disarray, soaked with rain and drenched in blood and ruined nearly beyond salvation. There is red all over the rug that Andrés had picked especially for this room, all smiles and glances of innocent satisfaction when Martín voiced his approval back in August.

There are bloodstained footsteps walking Martín's way, and he feels bile rising at the back of his throat. 

So he glances at the bedside table. 

And when he does, memories of past hours come rushing and erratic behind his eyelids, discarded bandages and bloody cloth and way too many painkillers downed in a single turn, and metal, the smell of it, the shape of it, and he turns away before an urge to break everything overtakes his every sense.

The eyes escape from it, too. 

Martín fixes them at the pallid, lifeless ceiling. It reminds him of Andres’ skin. 

He stares at the moonlight trailing pale colors over it, and those treacherous tears start finally falling. 

_(Andrés would have painted a better picture.)_

Everywhere he looks, he sees hell staring back at him, mocking all his efforts to try and seek peace. So he admits defeat, and decides to find a spot in the dark room so obscured by shadow that he wouldn't notice anything other than black. He would forget, and his mind would settle, letting the dark embrace the pieces of him that had remained. 

Then he remembers. 

He had turned the lights off two hours ago, as to not disturb Andrés' sleep. 

But Andrés was not sleeping. 

Martín wishes to scream. 

The sudden rise of panic makes his eyes snap wide open and he tries to stop his heart racing with anxiety, tries to reason with himself and find proof that the erratic movement of Andrés' chest is not just an illusion. He is there, he must be, this can't be his broken mind just imagining that Andrés is alive. Martín isn't a child anymore, he should believe his mind, his eyes, but he knows he can't. He knows, because the house is quiet and Andrés always talks, because he isn't waking up and _this is not how Andrés is, this silence is not you, because you love the music and you never sleep too long and you idiot, you slept so much today, please don't leave me alone, please wake up, Andrés-_

When he reaches out to him, he barely notices he started crying. 

His hand shakes when it traces Andrés' face, light caresses from the slightly furrowed brow, to the brim of his nose, stealing a touch at the angle of his jaw. 

It ends with Martín's palm resting on his cheek, a forbidden gentleness he is almost glad Andrés isn't awake to see. 

For a few seconds, silence stays the same. 

But then a movement comes fluttering beneath his fingertips. 

It starts barely, a hallucination at most, one that prompts Martín to concentrate and lean over him close, _so close_ , almost inches away from the face he loved the most. 

If he was brave enough, if he was just a fraction more reckless, it would not take a second to close the distance between them. 

Instead, he looks at Andrés slowly leaning into the warmth of his palm. 

The movement is enough to wrench Martín away from the cold hands of grief, to return warmth to aching limbs like frozen flowers with the first days of spring. His face burns with salt when the trembling lips stretch into a smile, and he doesn't dare move, doesn't dare look away anywhere else anymore, doesn't dare acknowledge the blood and the mess and what could have been if he didn't see Andrés back by the morning. Instead, he focuses on the little battle for consciousness taking place behind Andrés' eyelids, and can almost hear the voice in his ear again, one that had laughed and lived just like every night before, one he fell in love with like a hopeless, pure-hearted teenager from Buenos Aires that he knew he was decades ago.

And that voice, he knows, he will hear in the morning once more, because of course he will, because Andrés is the sun, and the sun is too bright of a star to disappear. 

The tears falling down his face turn colored with relief. 

_I'm home, Martín._

_(You're home.)_

**Author's Note:**

> I'm (not) sorry
> 
> Hope the writing wasn't too awful, I'm in a bad place mentally rn so this served as a vent fic and also to terrorize Ele and Isa<3
> 
> if you like my works, consider visiting me on Twitter (@Ccharades) for fic updates
> 
> Thank you so much for taking time to read<3


End file.
